Unrelated to VR but still: if anyone here hasn't yet watched drmeister's talk about Clasp and his "molecular metaprogramming" project, please do. Absolutely fascinating stuff.
Is there an article or initial analysis somewhere summarizing all that's known right now about this scary NSA/PRISM business (with links to sources ideally)? Or is it still too soon for such a thing?
I'm participating in a Google Student Ambassador program at my university and since I've always stressed the importance of privacy (especially in the era of the cloud) I feel obligated to educate my friends and colleagues about this.
I can't know how will this turn out eventually but I really hope for this (or something like this) to be a turning point for the music industry.
I love music, I really do, but at some point I became so disgusted by the way the industry works that I almost stopped caring. There surely is a better way to distribute music which would allow musicians to earn more money and the consumer to spend less at the same time by leaving out labels and distributors.
Thanks a lot for advice. I have still more than a year ahead before I need to make a decision so there's enough time to ask around when I narrow my choices. I haven't even made my mind whether I want to get into neuroscience or stay in molecular/cell biology.
Sadly, the situation as you decribed is almost the same with PhD students in the lab where I currently work on my diploma thesis and in some around in the institute. Having seen what I've seen (troubles with disertations and giving the PhD defense go-ahead) that's definitely something I want to avoid.
When I was young my attitude was similar but in my elementary school and high school two foreign languages were mandatory (English, German or Fench) so I didn't have any other choice. I live in Czech Republic.
At that age I couldn't care less but now that I'm thinking of doing a PhD in Germany (from what I've heard a very affordable country with many great life science labs) I'm very glad that I remember at least basics even that I haven't actually spoken German for six years.
I think that learning two major foreign languages should be mandatory. Almost everybody can learn one language quite well after +/- 10 years during childhood and to learn at least basics from the second one should not be that much of a problem too.
Human cells may have tens of times more forms of proteins expressed from these 23,000 genes if you take into account alternative splicing of pre-mRNA and many other post-translational modifications. These are all processes which prokaryotic organisms like M. genitalium generally lack.
Even when we look aside from the level of DNA/RNA there are huge differences in morphological organisation of eukaryotic cells when compared to most prokaryotes: dynamic compartmentalisation of cytoplasm, different types of cytoskeleton, vesicle trafficking, complex signal transduction networks instead of usually simple two-component regulatory systems... So the simulation of whichever human cell type could be much more complicated than one could initially thought.
I don't want to sound too much pessimistic, as someone with background in both CS and molecular biology I'm truly excited about this, but I still had to cool myself down a little bit after reading the article. I can't wait to read the original paper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X69_42Mj-g
Also recently discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9721801